X-Message-Number: 33448
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 16:38:15 -0500
Subject: A little thought experiment...
From: Vortex Prism <>

--bcaec51ddef1dffb74049e138bca

A little thought experiment...


Situation #1


Let's say I take a sleeping pill and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.
While I am out, my fun-loving neighbors pick me up and drive me a mile away
so that I wake up in a park a few hours later.


Situation #2


I take a sleeping pill and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. While I am out
my fun-loving neighbors scan my brain with sufficient fidelity to record my
every memory, concept, abstraction, etc. and then they kill me. Nice
neighbors, huh?


These same joyful people then drive to the same park and download all my
brain patterns into a biologically identical body. I wake up a few hours
later admiring the same park.


Result:


Relative to the person waking up in the park (me), as far as I can tell
there is absolutely no difference in the outcome of either situation. If you
claim there is a difference, it seems to me that you are attributing
something magical to a particular set of molecules in one flesh & blood body
over another.


In the first case, a set of molecules are physically being moved from one
location to the next. In the second case, the original arrangement of
molecules is destroyed and a identical arrangement of identical molecules is
created.


Comments?



P.S.

Please don't come back and say that if the first person isn't destroyed,
wakes up and seeing that he has been copied should happily puts a gun to his
head. You don't get to change the conditions of the test.

--bcaec51ddef1dffb74049e138bca

 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=33448